THE UNBORN

I SEE grim War, a bestial thing, with swinish tusks to tear;

Upon his back the vampires cling,

Thin vipers twine among his hair,

The tiger's greed is in his jowl,

His eye is red with bloody tears,

And every obscene beast and fowl

From out his leprous visage leers.

In glowing pride fell fiends arise,

And, trampled, God the Father lies.

Not God alone the Demon slays;

The hills that swell to Heaven drip

With ooze of murdered men; for days

The dead drift with the drifting ship,

And far as eye may see the plain

Is cumbered deep with slaughtered ones,

Contorted to the shape of pain,

Dissolving‘ neath the callous suns,

And driven in his foetid breath

Still ply the harvesters of Death.

He sits astride an engine dread,

And at his touch the awful ball

Across the quaking world is sped,

I see a million creatures fall.

Beyond the soldiers on the hill,

The mother by her basinet.

The bolt its mission must fulfil,

And in the years that are not yet

Creation by the blow is shorn

Of dimpled hosts of babes unborn!